Notes on life, worrying, and sucking at it

Life really fucking sucks sometimes. Sometimes the banality of your day to day life seems inescapable. Even when from the outside everything is coming up Milhouse for you, inside it feels like there is no right answer regardless of what you may choose.

Usually when this happens to me, I remind myself that nothing matters. Life has no meaning. You are a infinitesimally small spec of dust floating on a rock through infinity and your existence is not even a blip in the grand scheme of the universe. That might sound horrible to some people, but for me it’s calming. Nothing you do matters, so if you fuck up this thing you’re trying to do, who the hell cares? Obviously I do not apply this rhetoric to being a shitty person or murderer or whatever. Those things matter because you’re more than likely affecting someone else’s freedom to do things that don’t matter. Ya feel me?

Another option is to re-read my favourite Bill Bryson passage about how unlikely it is we exist. To paraphrase – “Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, killed or otherwise dissuaded from performing it’s life’s journey to deliver a tiny genetic parcel at exactly the right moment to exactly the right partner to result in the only combination of genetics that would eventually, amazingly and all to briefly result in you.”

So not only do these things not matter, but odds were against you that you may ever exist to experience these things at all.

The combination of those two things usually blow my tiny mind enough to decide that worrying is a waste of precious time and I might as well suck it up and do whatever thing it was I was worried about doing.

There are times, however, when this method doesn’t do it for me. When my brain is so filled up with problems ranging from “I ran out of toilet paper” to “I don’t know whether to leave the country” that melt down is eventually inevitable. In my case, that meant waking up my mother at 6am on the opposite side of the world to listen to me sob into a glass of wine about how “They’re even charging me for ‘freeview’ TV over here”.

What do you do then? What do you do when faced with choices that scare you and that being an insignificant dot doesn’t solve? Generally speaking, I go screaming and crying and terrified into whatever the scary thing is head on. Change isn’t always good, but it’s different. And if where you are now isn’t doing it for you, then it’s time for something different. Whether or not it’s better or worse than before is irrelevant at that point because things don’t progress by staying the same.

Or you forget all of the above in a blind panic and decide that you are trapped in your current situation forever because earth is just one big prison for all the humans which no one but Richard Branson and Elon Musk can escape.

Homesickness, jealousy, loneliness, fear and loathing in Las Vegas, all play a toll on what might otherwise be exciting changes in my life….except that last one actually - I’ve never seen that movie.

As much as I try to beat those suckers down they always come back to surprise me when I need them the least. “Oh you’ve got a lot going on right now? How about we also make you inexplicably jealous of things you can’t change and that have absolutely no bearing on your existence or ability to be happy? Cool.”

“Oh you’re homesick? How about we remember that you’re also terrible at making friends and it’s only going to get harder as you get older so you might as well give up now and buy a turtle.”

“You’ve decided to take on a new challenge I see. Let’s ensure you have impostor syndrome so you are constantly in fear that someone will find out you have no idea what you’re doing, no matter how much you excel.”

Thanks brain, you prick.

When I can figure out how to get around that one, I’ll write a self help book. It’ll only sell one copy. To myself. But I’ll sign it for me and write a little note that says ‘Keep on keepin’ on’ or something equally benign on the inside cover, so it’ll be pretty special.

My point is I don’t have a point. I don’t have a solution, I don’t have a conclusion. (Although I now think I’d make a hell of a rapper).

It’s ok not to have all the answers right now. Chances are they’ll come later, or maybe not at all because the questions will no longer be relevant.

I guess sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff and hope you aimed well enough to hit the water. If not you’ll have some pretty cool scars to tell stories about.